Facebook has revamped how pages work and interact. Facebook pages are now an established part of our online strategy and allow us to create a consistent stream of information for those interested in our work. Of course, they also allow us to get our key messages out to people and this requires a level of discipline, similar to putting together a Focus leaflet.
They are some key changes that we need to be aware of:
- Followers over Likes
The new system will focus on followers of your page. The ability to ‘like’ a page will be removed – this was a way of showing support without getting all of the content.
The benefit here is that you will have a clear set of people that are engaged with what we’re doing and interested in it – they will get our regular updates.
Where this may disadvantage us is in taking away one metric of support – a more broad sense of who was at least aware of us. Getting people to become ‘followers’ may feel like a bigger jump to them, especially if it was a singular issue that they were engaged on but they don’t feel that they want regular updates on everything we do.
The simple answer, at least to give, is to make sure that our content is both regular and engaging. If we can make ourselves a trusted source of useful information, people will want to get the regular updates being a follower allows.
What will be important is keeping an eye on the number of followers we have and that it is increasing. Even the very best political messages aren’t effective in an empty room.
- Interacting as your page
You’ll be able to do more as your page and interact with conversations across Facebook. This could be useful purely as a way to get your page seen, especially as people will be able to follow your page from a comment you have made in someone else’s conversation – making it an instant and more instinctive decision.
The first thing to always be aware of is who you are interacting as – your personal profile or your page? We also need to think about tone, again this is similar to writing a Focus. It may be tempting to reply to a popular comment on a community page under the guise of your page, after all, it will get seen by a lot of people who are clearly interested in the community. However, this may be seen as too political, especially as our pages are political by their very nature. Sometimes it is better to comment using your personal profile simply as an interested resident. People will still see your name and will hopefully recognise it from your other forms of campaigning but we’re less likely to be seen as opportunistic.
It is also worth remembering that many local and community groups have rules against overtly political posting. Constantly posting as your page may annoy the Admins and you run the risk of losing access to that page – as with literature and all other social media, judge the audience and adapt accordingly.
There are other changes being made to how pages will look and how you can manage them and you can see details here.
These changes are being rolled out and you may not have seen them yet or for a little while. As they take effect, we will update our advice to reflect users’ experiences. You can see some more general advice on using Facebook to campaign here.